Rendering
of planned residential skyscraper at 80 South Street in Lower
Manhattan

By Carter
B. Horsley

Santiago Calatrava in recent
years has ascended to the pantheon of internationally acclaimed
architects and his fame now is exceeded only by Frank O. Gehry
(see The City Review article).

His 80 South Street project
along the East River, shown above in a rendering, for developer
Frank J. Sciame in Lower Manhattan is the city's most eagerly
anticipated new project, even more so probably than the Freedom
Tower project at Ground Zero on the other side of downtown as
it is more flamboyant and radical. It is, however, still unclear
whether it will get built as the developer is still testing the
market for its ten very expensive four-story-townhouses-in-the-sky
condominium units. (Gehry's design for an even taller, mixed-use
tower a few blocks away has yet to be unveiled, leading some observers
to speculate that both towers could be even more important skyline
catalysts for a renaissance of Lower Manhattan that the developments
around Ground Zero.)

Rendering
of railroad terminal at site of demolished World Trade Center

Calatrava's transportation
hub in Lower Manhattan, shown above, is advancing, however, and
the Metropolitan Museum of Art currently has given him a one-man
show of his architecture, sculptures and drawings, the museum's
first exhibition on a living architect since 1973.

In his October 24, 2005
review of the show at the Metropolitan Museum for New York
Magazine, Mark Stevens observed that "During the interminable
struggle to respond appropriately to 9/11, a slugfest that’s
generated vast clouds of political and bureaucratic dust, we’ve
had only one blue-sky moment - the unveiling last year of Santiago
Calatrava’s luminous transit station at ground zero. The
immediate response, even among weary cynics, was something like
At last! New York’s finally rising to the challenge. The
building not only represented a classical expression of hope (it
evoked a bird taking flight) but gloried in the city’s past.
It invited comparison to the secular cathedrals of Grand Central
and the old Penn Station, and, equally, to the city’s great
modernist celebrations of movement, Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal
at Kennedy airport and Pier Luigi Nervi’s bus terminal at
the George Washington Bridge. Maybe, just maybe, the bravura new
building suggested, civic culture in New York was not moribund.
Maybe New York would once again find the energy to dream big.
Maybe it would have a 21st century.In
the same period, Calatrava also proposed building a skyscraper
near the Brooklyn Bridge, at South Street. This building was as
culturally provocative as his ground-zero station. It seemed to
infiltrate and subtly challenge the skyline, which is where New
York dreams. Recently, the skyline has been bulking up like an
athlete on steroids, the muscular boxes crowding out the slender
spires of an earlier era. Calatrava, by contrast, presented New
York with a slender, light-as-air building, one composed of twelve
stacked cubes that rise like a stairway to heaven. Each cube was
a residence, a townhouse afloat in the sky. And each, to be sure,
was absurdly expensive. But the idea also seemed otherworldly,
magical. He was putting the sky back in the skyline. It was the
first New York building in a long while to provoke that peculiar
architectural compliment: 'What’s that!' In the United States,
he’s given Milwaukee a talk piece, creating an addition to
its lakeshore art museum that has a dramatic brise-soleil that
opens and closes like the wings of a bird. He will build a cathedral
in Oakland, and, perhaps, the tallest skyscraper in Chicago....If
Frank Gehry is obsessed with the 'skin' of buildings, as many
critics suggest, then Calatrava delights in revealing their bones.
But he’s nothing like a 'form follows function' man; there’s
not much residue, in his sensibility, of the puritanical strain
of modernism that once rejected ornament and artifice. Calatrava
is essentially a baroque artist. He’s theatrical. He loves
movement. He uses contemporary engineering to create acrobatic
curves to wow an audience. His buildings are often biomorphic
in appearance - like those of Saarinen, the fanciful modernist
who is one of his heroes - rather than rectilinear. He likes the
arc. His signature shape is the wing....Calatrava’s bridges
- arguably his best work - are often whimsically asymmetrical.
They suggest a smile or a wave of the hand, instead of a trudge
across no-man’s-land. His airports and railway stations have
an airy quality of uplift....The Milwaukee addition evokes masts
and sails as well as wings. The transportation hub at ground zero
was inspired by the thought of a child releasing a bird into the
air.A man of curves
in a city of grids, Calatrava could help change our visual culture.
But his more important role may simply be to embolden New York.
If Calatrava gets a number of important commissions - and our
pusillanimous pols don’t financially starve his ground-zero
station to death - he could help change the visual culture of
New York. A man of curves in a city of grids, he could soften
some of the city’s hard edges and awaken a more feminine,
playful spirit. (He loves the Flatiron Building, with its prowlike
curve and strange raked angles.) Calatrava believes that New York
needs many more excellent buildings of “intermediate”
scale, to help humanize and modulate the powerful effect of so
many towers. He’s also an architect who insists upon air
and light, which is rarer than you might think. The weight of
New York is impressive, of course, but that doesn’t mean
architects shouldn’t also think about dematerializing line,
floating forms, and bringing more light down from the sky. Perhaps
Calatrava’s emphasis upon engineering and technological whiz-bang
will also help revive the now moribund tradition of creating brazen
engineering marvels."

Santiago
Calatrava, at right, at press preview of show at the Metropolitan
Museum

Calatrava's fame is based
on his extravagantly graceful and poetically alluring bridges,
transportation centers and museums. They are invariably light-colored
structures whose complex but cohesive forms are easier to comprehend
than Gehry's convoluted, often amorphous and mysterious compositions.
Both architects deliver drama: Calatrava with invitations to serenity;
Gehry with adventurous magnetism. Calatrava's works remain in,
if not define, the Modernist mainstream. Gehry's works are eccentric
exercises in imagination. Both are capable of considerable magic.

Some critics
have derided his non-architectural creations and others have suggested
that some of his works are extravagant for the sake of bravura.

In the December 15, 2005 issue of The New
York Review of Books, Martin Filler, in a long article entitled
"The Bird Man," surveys recent books on Calatrava and
is pretty critical of his aesthetics in a rather brilliant, but
harsh essay:

"Some
of Calatrava's coprofessionals have cast a skeptical eye on what
they see as his tendency to overelaborate his designs and obfuscate
the underlying structure. This is hardly typical in engineering,
a discipline whose practitioners consider it more a science than
an art, much less a form of magic. Any engineer or architect will
attest that it is hard to keep a design simple. On the other hand,
the duplication of design in order to enhance visual effects,
detectable in some of Calatrava's bridges, is also not easy to
produce. Not all of his eye-catching gestures are useful functionally;
they must be augmented by less apparent components that actually
do the heavy lifting. As Marc Treib, an architect who teaches
at Berkeley, remarked to me: 'With Calatrava there is the bridge,
and then there is the real bridge.'

"The
architect Renzo Piano once told his longtime technical collaborator,
the engineer Peter Rice, of his interest in the young Calatrava's
work. Piano recalled to me Rice's cautionary response: 'Something
is not right there. When you design a bridge, you go from here
to here,' which the engineer illustrated with a quick horizontal
swipe of his finger. Then, Rice added, 'You do not go from here
to here,' arching his right hand over his head and touching his
left ear....

"Several
buildings Calatrava has completed since Rice's death in 1992 make
the engineer's gesture seem prophetic. A good example is the Tenerife
Concert Hall of 1991 - 2003 in the Canary Islands. This was a
product of the frenzied moment when several other Spanish cities
- especially Bilbao and Valencia - felt compelled to commission
attention-getting architecture to compete with Seville, site of
the 1992 World's Fair, and Barcelona, the host city of the 1992
Olympics. Not to be outdone by any of them, the government of
Spain's Atlantic island outpost asked Calatrava to design an instant
landmark that would give Tenerife what Jørn Utzon's Sydney
Opera House of 1957 - 1973 has given Australia's largest city:
an architectural logotype as recognizable as the Eiffel Tower
or the Taj Mahal.

"The
white-painted concrete shells enclosing the oceanfront Tenerife
auditorium are overarched by a cantilevered, sickle-shaped roof,
190 feet high and intended to suggest a tsunami-size wave....Beyond
his power to bemuse, Calatrava has won many admirers because his
body of work is exceptionally consistent by current-day standards,
especially those of the present architectural avant-garde....Yet
Calatrava's streamlined all-white architecture - instantly identifiable
as his alone, and distinctively different from that of any of
his contemporaries - is not quite so original as some believe.
Calatrava is the first to admit this, as he often cites his debt
to Antoni Gaudí, although he clearly has no affinity for
the eccentric, handmade quality of the Catalan master's buildings,
with their bizarre admixtures of materials, textures, and colors.
Instead, Calatrava is drawn to the way in which Gaudí modeled
structural elements that resembled stylized animal skeletons.
The bonelike columns that can be seen in Gaudí's drawings
and models for his Templo Expiatorio de la Sagrada Familia in
Barcelona, on which he began to work in 1884, reappear in Calatrava's
unexecuted scheme of 1991 for the Cathedral Church of St. John
the Divine in New York. [See a reproduction of the design in The City Review
article.]
And the long enfilade of parabolic arches at Gaudí's Colegio
de Santa Teresa de Jésus of 1889–1894 in Barcelona
is so similar to passages in the work of Calatrava that he must
know that building well.It is easy to pay homage to a genius like
Gaudí (especially if you are also Spanish), but the ghosts
of other, less memorable, architects haunt Calatrava's oeuvre,
including some little-remembered mid-twentieth-century modernists.
The lacy, attenuated neo-Gothic canopies that the Japanese-American
architect Minoru Yamasaki made the centerpiece of his Federal
Science Pavilion at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair have rematerialized,
in modified form, in several Calatrava projects. The radial concrete
ribs and parabolic arches associated with the Italian engineer
Pier Luigi Nervi are commonplace in Calatrava's buildings....If
Calatrava seems to have moved backward through that time warp
in his nostalgia for the Space Age, he has taken many fans along
for the ride. To them, the ambition of Calatrava's architecture
is exhilarating, and reassuring in its recollection of a time,
not so long ago, when technology held out the promise of unlimited
human progress. Calatrava's confident and awe-inspiring public
works tap into a deep-seated desire for a future quite different
from the one we are facing, a yearning that does much to explain
his extraordinary success.

"This
has been an annus mirabilis for Calatrava. Earlier this
year he was awarded the American Institute of Architects' Gold
Medal, its highest honor, joining Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd
Wright, Mies, Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Louis Kahn, and Gehry,
among others. In October, Calatrava's Reina Sofía Palace
of the Arts, a $143-million opera house in his birthplace of Valencia,
was inaugurated, the last major structure in his City of Arts
and Sciences, an eighty-five-acre development that also includes
his Science Museum and Planetarium....

"The
Metropolitan exhibition's subtitle, Sculpture into Architecture,
reflects its subject's deep desire to be taken seriously as an
artist; ...The subtitle of the Metropolitan show implies an explanation
of how Calatrava's designs emerge in one medium and are more fully
developed when transposed to another. But that process is never
convincingly demonstrated....Whatever relevance Calatrava's explorations
in other mediums may have to his architecture, the artistic merit
of his slickly finished stone, metal, and wood sculptures - especially
the ones that seem to imitate Brancusi or come near to Noguchi
- falls well beneath the standards of the world's greatest encyclopedic
museum. Startling in another way are the show's two motorized
kinetic sculptures: a wavelike undulating floor piece and, above
the gallery entrance, Shadow Machine of 2005, a row of twelve
white-painted metal hooks that flail up and down like the talons
of some 1950s Japanese sci-fi monster. It is inconceivable that
any of these works would ever have been exhibited at the Metropolitan
were it not for the connection to Calatrava's architecture.

"Calatrava's
avian obsession first manifested itself in the wing-shaped glass-and-steel
canopy over the entrance to his Wohlen High School of 1983 - 1988
in Wohlen, Switzerland, but really took off with the pterodactylian
wings of his Lyons Airport Station of 1989 - 1994 in France, one
of several train terminals he has built.

"His
biggest American bird thus far is perched on the shore of Lake
Michigan: the Quadracci Pavilion at the Milwaukee Art Museum,
an addition to Eero Saarinen's building of 1953-1957, which was
expanded by David Kahler in 1975. In the museum's official publication
on the new building, Calatrava chooses a telling metaphor to describe
what he deems his old-fashioned architectural education: "Learning
was handed to me.... I preferred to hear a bird singing rather
than a person singing like a bird." Alexander Tzonis compares
the building's 217-foot-wide mechanized brise-soleil (or sunscreen)
to "the wings of a great seagull....

"Lacking
Gehry's sculptural gifts, Calatrava hopes to create movement with
the press of a button, and in designing the Quadracci Pavilion
in Milwaukee he combined his two great fixations: birds and machine-powered
building parts. Malfunctions have plagued his electronic components
elsewhere. His preference for bravura effect at the expense of
function can also be discerned in the disparity between the Quadracci
Pavilion's extravagant superstructure, which is little more than
a lobby, and the dreary exhibition galleries consigned to the
concrete box beneath it like some bothersome afterthought....

"The
flashy contours, flamboyant engineering effects, and mechanical
gimmickry of the Calatrava style are futuristic in a way that
went out of fashion circa 1965, when the last New York World's
Fair closed. The seemingly advanced (though in fact retrograde)
aspects of his architecture disguise its underlying sentimentality,
and make it palatable to patrons of a certain sophistication who
would reject more pronounced expressions of kitsch. That he has
found a constituency in the art world is perplexing, but his appeal
to a popular audience makes perfect sense. As cultural institutions
around the world reinvent themselves as marketers of mass entertainment,
the architecture they commission is reflecting that change all
too clearly. Like the mythical Roc, the huge bird that flew Sinbad
the Sailor to safety, the architecture of Santiago Calatrava speaks
to magical hopes for salvation. And in the world he is helping
to reshape, who would not want to be uplifted on the wings of
the dove?"

In his October 25, 2005
review of the museum exhibition in The New York Times,
Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote that "no one would argue that Mr.
Calatrava's sculptures would make it into the Met on their own
merits; as art, they are mostly derivative of the works of dead
masters like Brancusi." "One criticism," Mr. Ouroussoff
continued, "that surfaces is that his work is too gimmicky.
Structural purists, for example, compare Mr. Calatrava unfavorably
with the early 20th-century engineer Robert Maillart, whose early
bridges, resting on delicate three-hinged arches, were models
of efficiency. Virtually unadorned, they are ingenious structural
diagrams stripped down to their essence. By comparison, Mr. Calatrava
sometimes seems caught up in his own wizardry; his designs become
overwrought.The evidence
both for and against this argument can be found in the show. Not
far from the transportation hub is a model of the Milwaukee Art
Museum, its lobby enveloped in two enormous brises-soleil. Their
forms rise and fall to control the light flow into the lobby,
evoking a bird occasionally stretching out its wings. The movable
structures are a well-worn Calatrava theme, but here they amount
to self-indulgence. The structure encloses nothing but a lobby;
the museum's art galleries are secondary. Their irrelevance to
the design is evoked in the model, where they are simply chopped
off midway. At other times, it is this kind of bravura that makes
you love his work. The sprawling City of Arts and Sciences, Calatrava's
masterwork, testifies to the range of his vision. The concrete
and glass canopy of the planetarium conjures an eye rising out
of the water, and the repetitive arches of the winter garden are
imbued with a ripe sensuality, taut with energy. Like Gaudi's
creations, Calatrava's work is about fantasy: the rigorous structure
of the armature is there to hold the flesh together and give it
life."

Santiago
Calatrava explaining the twist of his "Turning Torso"
model

In an article in the October
31, 2005 edition of The New Yorker magazine, Paul Goldberger
noted that "Calatrava’s first high-rise apartment tower,
in Malmö, Sweden, has been christened the Turning Torso,"
adding that "The title is a reference to a white marble sculpture,
by Calatrava, of a human form in motion; in 1999, the five-foot-high
work so captivated the building’s developer that he hired
Calatrava to stretch the piece into a skyscraper - even though
the architect had not yet designed one." "The fifty-four-story
structure, which has views of Copenhagen from across the Øresund
Strait, opens in November," Mr. Goldberger continued: "There
are a hundred and forty-seven apartments - each of which has slanting
windows, curving walls, and oddly shaped rooms - and all of them
have been rented."

Calatrava, Mr. Goldberger
maintained, "is the most crowd-pleasing architect since Frank
Gehry. His work, too, is dazzling and emotionally engaging. And,
just as Gehry exploited the trend of museum building in the nineteen-nineties,
Calatrava has aligned himself with the latest architectural fashion:
bespoke luxury-apartment towers. In 2003, he designed a striking
apartment complex for lower Manhattan consisting of twelve four-story
cubes stacked in a tall, open frame. And this spring a Chicago
developer, Christopher T. Carley, announced that Calatrava will
design a corkscrew-shaped, hundred-and-fifteen-story tower, along
Lake Michigan, which will contain condominiums and a hotel; the
building, when completed, will be the tallest in the United States."

"Calatrava buildings
don’t sit on the ground; they dance above it," Mr. Goldberger
continued. "Dancing
is not what skyscrapers are expected to do, and Calatrava’s
Turning Torso takes some getting used to. Unlike most skyscrapers,
which are designed to look immobile no matter how much they may
sway in the wind, this tower looks strangely kinetic - as if it
were poised to move horizontally. Usually, the thrust of skyscrapers
is vertical: capped with fancy tops, they resemble castles or
rocket ships. Most architects who design skyscrapers focus on
two aesthetic problems: how to meet the ground, and how to meet
the sky - the bottom and the top, in other words. Calatrava is
interested solely in the middle. For him, the skyscraper isn’t
a classical column, with a base, a shaft, and a capital. It’s
all shaft - which he has made an object of propulsion and energy....Calatrava’s
Malmö design begins with a structural motif - the human spine
- and builds from there.The
Turning Torso literally has a spine, since Calatrava has designed
the building with an external steel frame running up one side
of it....Calatrava’s dancer, then, is more like a marionette-controlled
by visible means of support. But this doesn’t detract from
the design: the steel bracing is one of the handsomest things
about this building....Inside, the Malmö apartments are generally
what you would expect - sunny living spaces with sleek, refined
European kitchens....What makes the apartments special - but also
more difficult, depending on your standpoint - is that there are
almost no rectangular rooms. Living rooms are shaped like pie
wedges, or have the zigzag outline of a W. Some wall-height windows
are raked nearly at the angle of a car windshield. Unlike in most
apartments, a person inside the Turning Torso is always aware
of the building’s exterior.The
Malmö tower is somewhat cluttered conceptually: the audacious
stacked-box idea competes with the even more powerful notion of
a twisting skyscraper. In Calatrava’s design for lower Manhattan,
the concept of stacked cubes is expressed more cleanly and successfully."

One of Calatrava's finest works is the Bodegas
Ysios in Laguardia, Alva, Spain. Its undulating roof and silvery
edges are equisitely articulated.

While some of the criticisms that his works
are excessive and extravagant are perhaps occasionally valid,
so what? So are Gothic cathedrals and the Parthenon!

Some
sculptures by Santiago Calatrava

Calatrava is unquestionably a very great form-giver,
and, perhaps more importantly, he is not formulaic in his designs
and their high quality is very consistent. His transportation
hub, and the 80 South Street projects are not his masterpieces,
but then this is New York where building is not easy and Calatrava's
mere celebrity presence is making a difference in the city's design
sensitivity. Both projects pay no heed to architectural context
and the hub's above-ground section is too large and rather aggressive,
like his Shadow monster. Still, New York should welcome them and
hope that he will do more projects here. As to aspersions that
his sculptures are not up to Brancusi's and Noguchi's, well one
could argue that contemporary art is not up to Donatello and Verrochio.
His sculptures are fine and handsome.